Howard Frank Mosher, whose novels brought to life whiskey runners, trappers, farmers, loggers and other characters of a hardscrabble region in rural Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom, died on Jan. 29 at his home in Irasburg, Vt. He was 74.

His wife, Phillis, said that the cause was lung cancer.

Concerned about his health, Mr. Mosher had hurried to finish his last book in December. He announced his illness on Facebook on Jan. 22, one day after telling followers about the publication of that book.

“Well, the best-laid plans, as they say,” he wrote, adding that he had thought he had an “upper respiratory bug” but that it was ultimately diagnosed as cancer. “I am happy to leave you all with the gift of what may be my best book in ‘Points North.’”

His awareness in December that something was wrong with his lungs pushed him to finish the stories in “Points North” in eight days, writing in pen on legal pads at his dining room table, his wife said. Then, as usual, he sent the manuscript off to be typed.

Mr. Mosher’s fictional Kingdom County, Vt., became his New England version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — a fertile setting for place-based fiction in works like “God’s Kingdom” (2015) and “Northern Borders” (1994).

On his website, Mr. Mosher described the Northeast Kingdom, an area comprising three counties, as a “region of jumbled mountains, deep forests, glacial lakes and scattered hill farms,” where “people still live close to the world of nature we were all once part of.” It became the fictional home to the Kinnesons, familiar characters in his novels and stories, whom Mr. Mosher based on his own family.

In a review of “God’s Kingdom,” a coming-of-age story about Jim Kinneson, an aspiring writer, the novelist Jon Clinch wrote in The Washington Post: “Vermont’s remote and lovely Northeast Kingdom existed before Mosher claimed it for his own, and with any luck it will exist long after we’re gone. That its history and culture will remain indelible is Mosher’s gift to posterity.”

Mr. Mosher was born on June 2, 1942, in the Hudson River city of Kingston, N.Y. His father, Howard Hudson Mosher, was a school administrator, and his mother, the former Helen Emily Trapp, who had a degree in French, was a homemaker. The younger Mr. Mosher earned a bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University and a master’s at the University of Vermont.

Settling in the Northeast Kingdom in 1964 as a high school English teacher, Mr. Mosher, who arrived with his wife — the former Phillis Claycomb, who taught science — quickly found that they had stumbled upon a lode of stories that writers had barely mined.

For instance, the landlady at their first Vermont home, in the town of Orleans, told them how she had persuaded a federal revenue agent not to arrest her for moonshining during the Depression by telling him that if she lost the illicit income it produced, she and her husband would lose their farm. Decades later, after she was widowed — and no longer moonshining — she met the agent again and married him.

Recalling his and his wife’s reaction to the landlady’s tale, Mr. Mosher told Vermont Public Radio, “Both of us knew, without saying a word, that I would write the stories of the Northeast Kingdom, come hell or high water.”

The gist of the landlady’s story found its way into Mr. Mosher’s 1978 book, “Where the Rivers Flow North,” a novella and stories.

Jay Craven, who has made five films based on the author’s books — including “Northern Borders” (2015), with Bruce Dern and Geneviève Bujold, and “Disappearances” (2006), with Kris Kristofferson — likened Mr. Mosher’s work to investigating a fading civilization.

“Howard arrived at the last minute to observe the culture of a Vermont that was still rooted in the late 19th century,” Mr. Craven said in a phone interview. “So he approached it as an archaeologist or anthropologist; he dug deeply into the natural world and came away with an intense motivation to collect everything he could.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Mosher is survived by his daughter, Annie; his son, Jake; two grandchildren; and a brother, Terry. His mother died on Jan. 23, six days before he did, at 102.

Mr. Mosher was known for his unflagging support of fellow authors and independent bookstores. His publicity tours usually started at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vt., where he would read from his newest book or give a slide show, which sometimes featured a picture of Mr. Mosher blasting a negative newspaper review with his shotgun. His last appearance at the store, in 2015, attracted such a crowd that it had to be moved to a nearby opera house.

“The real drama and the real entertainment came when he talked about what inspired his books,” Sandy Scott, a co-owner of the bookstore, said in an interview. “That’s when his personality came out.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Howard Frank Mosher, 74, Novelist of Rural Vermont. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe